


wrap your roots all around my bones

by shuofthewind



Series: The Trick to Binary Stars [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Badass SHIELD Agents, Bechdel Test Pass, Canon-Typical Violence, Female Friendship, Gen, Maximoff Headcanons, Multi, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, SHIELD Agent Darcy Lewis, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, The Becoming of Darcy Lewis, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-18
Updated: 2015-08-18
Packaged: 2018-04-15 08:25:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4599762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuofthewind/pseuds/shuofthewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy’s five, but she’s already learned to read, so she knows precisely why her grandmother gets that weird pinched look to her mouth when she sees Darcy’s marks. On her left wrist, the handwriting—a bit loopy, a bit cramped, but clear all the same—spells out, <em>I am sorry, can we perhaps talk about this later?</em> And on the right, in crooked, hasty script, reads, <em>Maybe when no one is shooting at us.</em></p><p>It sets the tone for a lot of her life, to be entirely honest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wrap your roots all around my bones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mauisse Flowers (Mauisse_Flowers)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mauisse_Flowers/gifts), [broadwanime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/broadwanime/gifts).
  * Inspired by [write love on my skin](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1835587) by [amusewithaview](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amusewithaview/pseuds/amusewithaview). 



> Trigger warnings for: gun violence, angst, mentions of alcoholism, mentions of human experimentation and psychological torture/brainwashing, and mad, mad retconning of AOU, because Whedon, no, you do not do that to my Sokovian babies. 
> 
> This fic operates under the premise that (as implied in TWS) the twins were actually captured and experimented on, rather than willing participants in the process. As such, the trigger warnings above have been put into place. It should hopefully be manageable for anyone who watched TWS okay.
> 
> Also, I reject your Barton, Joss, and substitute him with my own. 
> 
> Soulmates in this 'verse are marked from birth (or from their soulmates' birth) with the first words they will exchange. A silver soulmark means romantic. A gold soulmark means platonic. There have been other colors, mostly to do with weird Marvel shenanigans. It's up to you what you want to make of Steve's. 
> 
> Title comes from "I Will Never Die" by Delta Rae, which is very much a Maximoff twins song for me.

She gets her words when she’s five, matching curls around her wrists. They appear one right after the other, on her left arm first, then on the right, maybe ten minutes apart, maybe fifteen. Her babushka tells her that this means it’s most likely that her soulmates—her grandmother calls them friends of the soul, because Darcy’s, you know, five—are related. Quite probably, they are twins. The handwriting is different, but similar, like they learned from the same person. Will learn, her grandmother corrects her, because if Darcy is five, that means her soulmates have just been born, can’t even dream of picking up a pencil for months or years. Darcy calls them _The Twins_ , capitalized always, though most people can’t pick that up just from her saying it aloud. When she gets older, she starts calling them _her_ Twins, but that’s only silent, only ever in her head. _My Twins_ , lacing around her wrists like bracelets or handcuffs or chains. Her mother calls them her manacles. Lorna has never had a soulmark, never wanted one, and is viciously, vocally proud of it. (“Ain’t no one got time for that shit,” she tells Darcy one night, when Darcy’s thirteen and Lorna catches her rubbing her right wrist with her thumb. “All of it. Waste of fucking time.”

Lorna’s drunk at the time—it’s rare to find a time when Lorna’s not drunk—but it stings worse than Darcy wants to admit.)

Darcy’s five, but she’s already learned to read, so she knows precisely why her grandmother gets that weird pinched look to her mouth when she sees Darcy’s marks. On her left wrist, the handwriting—a bit loopy, a bit cramped, but clear all the same—spells out, _I am sorry, can we perhaps talk about this later?_ And on the right, in crooked, hasty script, reads, _Maybe when no one is shooting at us_.

It sets the tone for a lot of her life, to be entirely honest.

.

.

.

The first time Darcy gets involved in a firefight is not in New Mexico, but at Culver, when she accidentally comes across an entire fucking Army battalion crossing the quad like some kind of Panzer invasion from World War Two.

She’s not supposed to be here. She’s really not supposed to be here. She fell asleep in her fucking reading tree, okay, and woke up when someone shot off a tank in her general direction. It’s a miracle she’s not on fire right now. She’s a freshman, for Christ’s sakes, this is not what she signed on for coming into Culver. What she signed on for was political science and maybe, just maybe, a summa cum laude ranking, not—not tanks and gigantic green roaring monsters that apparently can fling said tanks like they’re Tonka trucks.

She stays in her tree. And after it’s over, and she’s done throwing up, and the Army’s hustled off to places unknown, she decides that yeah, maybe hoping she can get through life with a taser she bought for fifty bucks off of eBay isn’t exactly the most conducive way to keep herself alive.

.

.

.

Culver might not offer a class in firearms, but it’s Georgia. There are more people here with guns than she ever really realized, and she grew up in a neighborhood peppered with Confederate flags. It’s not too hard to find a shooting range, and after about six months of scrupulous savings, she buys her own gun. It’s nothing huge, the same kind of semiautomatic that policemen carry (she’s done her research, talked with women she knows in the criminal justice department, figured what she can afford to spend and based that around carry convenience and clip size and recoil and whatever else she’s listed out in her Need To Know notebook) (Darcy makes a lot of lists) but it’s hers, and this is her gun, and by god, she’s going to know how to use it.

She makes friends with some of the other women at the range, not just because they’re women in a building that’s stereotypically crawling with beefy dudes with ego issues, but also because they’re kind of super awesome. Carol’s an Air Force pilot stationed at one of the bases near here, likes to practice with civilians when she can. “Get a different kind of air in my lungs, y’know,” she says, as she minutely adjusts Darcy’s grip and then judges her satisfactory. “Plus people don’t call me Captain out here.”

“Nah, just Cap,” Darcy says, and ignores the look Carol gives her. Then Carol—because it’s Carol—snaps her headset over her ears, and lands four shots in center mass, just to prove a point.

Val, on the other hand, is an enigma. She’s a grad student at Culver, focusing primarily in international political economies (or so she says; Darcy never really sees her around campus, so she’s not actually sure). She’s the sort of person who changes her ethnicity by the day—when Darcy first meets her, she says her father’s Italian, then she mentions her Iraqi grandmother, and then her Swedish cousin, and her South African aunt: the list goes on—but she’s steady, all barbed-wire and caramel, and she’s great to go drinking with. Darcy’s only been legal for a grand total of five minutes before she gets Val blowing up her phone about clubbing. She sees Val’s soulmark that night, but only by accident. Val (who gets a slight, burring accent when she gets drunk that Darcy can’t quite identify) peels off her T-shirt when she gets too overheated from dancing for so long. The words _get down before I put you down myself_ are emblazoned across her left shoulder blade, underneath the straps of her bra and tank top.

If Val notices the way Darcy starts rubbing at her right wrist again, digging her nails in over the _shooting at us_ part, then she doesn’t say anything. Darcy’s pretty sure Val’s too drunk to notice anything at the moment.

She’s never seen Carol’s soulmark, though she’s about 75% sure Carol has one. She gets really tight-lipped when Val pushes about it, and refuses to say anything at all.

.

.

.

Carol might be the one to get her through all her shooting courses with flying colors, but Val’s the one who introduces her to kickboxing. Darcy’s not all that into the whole exercise thing, to be honest. She’s naturally kind of—not pudgy, exactly, but her bones are heavy, and she’s very curvy, so doing anything explicitly physical can be a bit of a drama no matter how many sports bras she wears. She starts going to Val’s gym because Val doesn’t let her say no, and yeah, the push-ups and the punching bags are kind of a pain in the ass when it comes to her boobs (don’t even get her started on the running, that’s even worse) but it’s good exercise. She doesn’t exactly lose the weight she has, just exchanges tissue for muscle in some places. Also, she now knows that no matter what happens, nobody normal will be able to take her gun from her. It’s a nice thought.

.

.

.

Sometimes she wakes up with nightmares of ticking bombs. She’s not entirely sure where they come from. She stares at the missile, wide and fat as a whale in the middle of the room, and she watches it, her heart pounding. Nothing ever happens. It doesn’t stop her from waking in tears.

.

.

.

Three weeks after Carol’s sent back to Afghanistan (or Iraq, or whatever part of the Middle East that the US is marching on lately that Carol can’t technically talk about, because she’s special enough to get secret missions, secret postings) Val breaks into Darcy’s dorm room through the window—the lock’s broken, and Val keeps it that way—before hustling her up out of bed and out the door.

“C’mon,” she says. “C’mon, c’mon. I have a great idea.”

“Does this idea involve coffee?”

“This idea involves getting your ass to graduate,” Val says. “And also coffee.”

“I am for this idea.”

She’s a little more awake when they get to Latte for Class, the school café, but at the same time Darcy still hasn’t fully processed anything Val’s said before Val plonks Darcy down in a chair at an occupied table. “Intern,” Val says, *meet boss. Boss, meet your new intern.”

Boss, who (to Darcy’s distinct confusion) is wearing a shirt that says _Quarkulous_ across her boobs, a plaid flannel button-down with paint stains on one sleeve and a bit of duct-tape on the right elbow, and a scarf, even though it’s April and hot as fuck out. Then again, Darcy’s in a beanie and leggings despite said weather, so who knows what ground she has to stand on about fashion choices. She looks more like another grad student than someone who actually, you know, needs an intern. She can’t be more than twenty-eight at the most, and she’s tiny. Like, Darcy can loop her thumb and index finger around this woman’s wrist-bones tiny.

Boss blinks (dazedly, as if she’s the one who’s just been yanked out of sleep by her hair) and then frowns at Val for a moment. “I don’t need an intern, Valentina,” Boss says, and Val (Valentina? Really? No wonder Val never uses her full name) flings herself into the chair between Darcy and Boss with a huff.

“Bullshit you don’t need an intern, Foster. Whatever the astrotacular department likes to think—” (Val was a double-major in undergrad, political science and theoretical physics) “—you have way too much shit to do and not enough hands or hours in the day to manage it. Not to mention that Lewis here conveniently forgot that she needs internship credits to graduate, and all her polisci deadlines have passed like…ages ago.”

“Technically,” Darcy says, or starts to say, but then Val puts her heeled boot on top of Darcy’s foot and pushes down, so she shuts up. It’s not that the application deadlines passed, she thinks. It’s that nobody wanted to take her on. She’s still not sure if it’s because of her boobs or her smart mouth or because she _refuses_ to let people pander to her, but nobody had ever replied, so. There’s that.

“So, _ipso ergo facto:_ intern.” Val points to Darcy. “Meet Boss.”

“Hey, Boss,” Darcy says, and Foster—probably Dr. Foster, though Darcy doesn’t exactly know what she’s a doctor of, besides astrophysics—looks down at her half-eaten banana nut muffin with the sort of expression that most people would only wear going to the execution block. Darcy’s nose wrinkles. First of all, because excuse you, she knows any number of people who would love to have an intern. Her, for one. There are not enough hours in the day to do all the things she has to do and bingewatch on Netflix. And secondly, because banana nut muffins always smell like gym socks.

“I don’t need to be managed, Valentina,” Foster says to her muffin. “And I really doubt your friend, whoever she is, wants to put internship for Doctor Jane Foster, crackpot, rumor-monger, and myth-chaser onto her resume after this.”

“Darcy’s not a hard scientist, so we’re cool, Jane. All’s good.” Val looks up at the menu board, and then says, “Fuck your muffin, I’m getting a cinnamon roll,” before departing from the table.

Darcy fiddles with the hem of her gloves (she really wants to pull out her iPod and plug her earbuds in, which is what she always does when things are complicated and/or awkward and/or complicated and awkward) but she just looks at Jane Foster instead. Jane opens her mouth and closes it a few times, and then gives Darcy a hard-eyed look. “What’s your major?”

“Political science,” Darcy says, promptly. “Y’know, borders and international treaties and petitions for better wages and stuff. Nothing to do with space at all. Minoring in biochem because I’m fucking insane.”

She winces— _god, your mouth, girl, watch your mouth—_ but Jane just waves this off. “You okay with numbers?”

“I like numbers.” Darcy taught herself her times-tables in kindergarten because adding was boring to her, but she doesn’t say this. She rarely talks about that. “And I like organizing things. It’s actually a primary talent, organizing things. It’s, like, listed under my summary on Facebook. Darcy Lewis, Esquire, Queen of Awesome and Organizer Extraordinaire.”

Jane gets this weird pinched look around her mouth, but then she says, “Food?”

“Like…what’s my favorite or can I make it?”

“Both.”

Darcy mulls this over. “I like pasta. And I pour a mean bowl of cereal.”

“Can you drive?”

“Stick and automatic. Also motorcycle, but, you know, I doubt you have one of those.” Yet another gift from Carol. _Every girl should know how to drive a bike_ , Carol had informed her. _Well, a bike and a plane. But I can’t get you a pilot’s license before my next posting, so a bike it is_.

Darcy’s still fully on board with this notion, yes, indeed, because _hello, bikes_.

“Computers?”

“I am the master of Photoshop and Excel spreadsheets.”

“Photoshop won’t be necessary.” says Jane briskly. “Other marketable skills?”

“Uh. I make good coffee. Also, can toast Pop-Tarts like a pro and shoot skeet.” And beer cans from five hundred yards, but that’s more second-date material.

“Soulmate?”

Darcy stills. “Pretty sure that’s a question that can get you cited in most states.”

“I want to know if I’m getting an intern that will run off at the last minute with a soulmate that’s cropped up out of nowhere,” says Jane, and there’s an odd hint of bitterness to her words that Darcy doesn’t understand until they’re halfway to New Mexico and she catches a glimpse of Jane’s odd, rainbow knotmark just beneath her right clavicle.

“Plural,” Darcy says, because she rarely covers up her soulmarks. After all, the phrase _shooting at us_ is on the underside of her wrist, and the handwriting of Right Twin is so crappy that most people can’t read it at a distance anyway. “Also unknown at this point. They’re, like…barely halfway through high school, I think. They were only born when I was five.”

Jane’s eyes drop to her wrists, and then lift back up to Darcy’s face. Val comes back with three cinnamon rolls instead of one, and uses her baseball team skills to pitch Jane’s gross banana nut muffin in the garbage. One of the football players on the other end of the café whoops appreciatively. Val flips him off. “You two crazy kids worked yourselves out, yet?” She looks smug. Well, Val always looks smug. “Or do I have to lock you in a closet?”

“Room and board provided,” Jane tells her. “Six months minimum. Are you almost done with your classes?”

“Mostly.”

“Good, because we’re heading to New Mexico in four weeks.”

Darcy doesn’t say that she hasn’t actually accepted the job, because she’s pretty sure she’ll end up dead. Also, she kind of wants to see what the hell an astrophysicist wants with New Mexico.

.

.

.

Darcy’s not sure how her internship duties shifted from _provide coffee when necessary_ to _craft whole identity for alien psycho with excellent abs_ , but it happens. She has Carol to thank for it, to be honest. Carol’s the one who taught her how to hack the DMV. Thor’s just lucky she’d elected to leave her gun behind in the trailer than take it along stormchasing. Shooting your boss’s soulmate? Not the best way to maintain good working relationships.

The rainbow knot makes a whole lot more sense when she’s presented with a rainbow bridge and a fucking Norse demigod, that’s all she has to say.

.

.

.

Jane’s soulbond with Thor is both emotive and locational, which means she can feel Thor’s emotions (once the link’s forged, anyway, which takes speech and sight and touch, not necessarily in that order considering Jane hits him with a car) (it’s Jane’s fault, she will swear to this in court) and generally be able to sense where he is, geographically, and whether he’s near or far away. It’s more emotive than locational, though, so Jane has to really focus hard to get a direction, but she manages it. She stands there on the mark that rainbow bridge travel leaves behind, and she keeps her eyes closed as she stretches and stretches and stretches. (That’s what Jane calls it, stretching, as if she’s reaching farther and farther and farther for something she can’t quite get a hand on.)

They stand there for hours, and Darcy watches as Jane’s face turns from hopeful to stubborn to furious to hurt. Finally, the sun has set. They turn away. Erik takes one of Jane’s arms, and Darcy takes the other, and the three of them go back into the lab, because there’s nothing else they can do.

.

.

.

She ends up turning over her gun to Agent iPod Thief the same way she turns over her iPod. He stares at her so implacably, like some kind of—of fucking _X-Files_ Skinner on scary-juice, that she gives in and hands it over. Jane’s eyes get very big and then very narrow in about two whole seconds, but she doesn’t comment.

Erik is a bit skittish around her, after. She only works out that it’s because he thinks she was put here to spy on Jane after the whole Destroyer thing, and she gets so mad at him that she doesn’t speak to him for a week. Darcy’s a gun-wielding badass, for god’s sake. Not a spy.

After everything is over, though, Agent iPod Thief returns to give her gun back personally. “You registered it,” he says, when she looks at the semiautomatic, and then at him, before snatching it away and turning it over in her hands. She’ll find two bugs in it when she disassembles the thing later, and squashes them beneath the heel of her combat boot. “We can’t legally keep it from you without charging you with something.”

“Considering everything else you’ve done has been oh-so-legal,” Darcy snaps. She’s really glad Jane fell asleep like…three hours ago. She doesn’t need to see Agent iPod Thief so soon after Thor’s disappearance. A soulmate, here and then gone again. What does that feel like? “You could have just kept it. What do you want?”

Agent iPod Thief considers her for a second or two. He has that weird, mild, _see-me-not_ look down pat, like he’s someone entirely unexceptional, just a guy in a suit in the middle of the desert, handing a gun back to the intern of the woman who united two ends of the universe. “I want to offer you a job,” he says, and Darcy’s brain shorts out.

“I already have a job.”

“A post-graduate job,” he clarifies. “We’ve looked into you, Miss Lewis. Valentina Allegra de Fontaine nabbed you this internship. Captain Carol Danvers of the United States Air Force taught you to shoot and how to ride a motorcycle. You hit an alien with a car and then forged him a new identity through hacking the US government.”

“You can’t prove that was me.” It’s a weak excuse, and they both know it. “Dude, I’m an intern. I just brew coffee and make sure nothing gets set on fire. Trust me, you don’t want me as one of your gophers. I’d probably knock over important files and get them all out of order. Or something.”

“We wouldn’t want you as a gopher, Miss Lewis,” says Agent iPod Thief. His eyes dip to her wrists, just for a moment, and she knows—she knows—he knows what her marks say. She knows that he’s telegraphing everything he’s doing, letting her see his train of thought, because he knows it’ll make her think, make her second-guess her answer, make her think: _this might be the only way you meet them_. She’s not sure if she’s furious at him for it, or just hella impressed.

He gives her a card. There’s nothing on either side of it, though when she shifts it back and forth, she thinks she sees a glimmer of numbers on the rougher side. Maybe invisible ink? What the fuck. “We’ll be in touch.”

He’s halfway back to his car when Darcy finally finds her voice again. “I can already tell you the answer will be no!”

Agent iPod Thief lifts one hand in a wave, and doesn’t look back.

.

.

.

The second time SHIELD tries to recruit her, it’s three weeks after the Battle of New York. Darcy unlocks the door to her Atlanta apartment (back to Culver for a few weeks, because somehow she’s gone from Jane’s intern to Jane’s personal assistant to Jane’s whatever-Darcy-really-does-anymore, whatever, where goeth Jane, so goeth her country) to find a woman with crow-black hair and very intense cheekbones sitting at her kitchen table, a bandage on her eye and her hands flat against the wood. She looks enough like a secret agent that Darcy doesn’t even bother asking how she managed to get in, that’s how fucking insane her life has become.

“Seriously, I have like…five million pages of grad school applications to go through, so can you say your piece and then go away? Because I am very not happy with SHIELD right now.”

The woman with the cheekbones tips her head to the side, and Darcy wishes she’d invested in that dumb underarm holster that Carol had tried to convince her to buy. It seems like a much more reasonable idea now that there’s some spy sitting at her kitchen table, watching her like a hawk. “Seriously, you like—first you try to send me and Jane to Tromso, which, not cool, guys, Thor’s only _her soulmate_ —” she dumps her bag onto the floor of the entryway, and kicks off her shoes “—but secondly when Jane says, _um, hell no, that’s my fucking soulmate, who has returned to this plane of existence after a year_ , what do you do? You lock us in a bunker for four days. Like what the fuck. No internet, no news. Nobody told us anything. And when we get out, Thor’s gone again, and I’m gonna have to spend six more months peeling Jane up out of the carpet, because her stupid goddamn soulmate keeps ditching like it’s his fucking job. And don’t even get me fucking started on what happened to Erik. I don’t care if there’s like a million Your Eyes Only bans on his case, the guy was fucking brainwashed by an alien Castro, okay, and apparently that’s not SHIELD’s problem either? Or Thor’s, by the way. So I am the most unhappy with you. With all of you, actually. Thor and SHIELD. In whatever combination you like. So yeah. Uh. Say your piece and then go away, please. Or just make with the leaving, don’t say anything at all. That’d probably be better.”

“Hm,” says the woman eventually, and stands. She’s taller than Darcy, and has the same kind of corded competence to her that Carol does. “Coulson was right. You could be a good asset, if you wanted to be.”

 _How the fuck did I lose the tack of this conversation?_ “Well, I don’t want to be. So there’s that.” She pauses. “Couslon? Oh. Agent iPod Thief.” She regards Agent Cheekbones for a moment. “Wait, are you guys trying to recruit me again? Because when a girl says no…”

“Only if you’re willing to be recruited,” Agent Cheekbones says. “Mostly I wanted to see what you would do if presented with an intruder.”

“Depends on whether or not the intruder is SHIELD,” Darcy replies. “Go away. I have scientists to wrangle.”

Agent Cheekbones leaves through the front door, as nonchalantly as a cat. Darcy can’t for the life of her find evidence that her lock was picked, so she has them changed, instead.

.

.

.

It’s post-Aether and immediately post-HYDRA that Darcy finally accepts.

It’s not for SHIELD, obviously. SHIELD is gone. Even if there are minor shadow groups running around (and Darcy knows there are; she monitors the Rising Tide same as any politically-savvy hacker type, and the rumors are flying) SHIELD itself is worth nothing more than mud, these days. HYDRA is the name on everyone’s lips, really, and for all the worst reasons. So when Agent Cheekbones—Maria Hill, she corrects herself, because for god’s sake, she’s seen the woman on TV enough by now—shows up on her doorstep again, this time in Malibu because again, where goest Jane, Darcy steps aside to let her in. Val—out in California for a fortnight, bless the lives of the wealthy and the unemployed—is sitting on her living room loveseat, and she goes all panther-still when she sees Hill in the doorway.

“Hill,” Val says, in a careful sort of voice that Darcy’s never heard from her before. Hill gives Darcy a look, and then meets Val’s gaze squarely. “Contessa.”

 _Contessa_? Darcy thinks, rubbing at _perhaps we can talk about this later_. “You two know each other?”

“We have acquaintances in common,” Hill says, finally, because Val, for once, is saying nothing at all. “Besides, the Contessa has her own agenda when it comes to—when it came to SHIELD.”

Darcy turns. “Val?”

“SHIELD helped my dad out once.” Val doesn’t take her eyes off of Hill. “Years ago. I applied to the Academy, but I was rejected.”

“Encouraged to choose elsewhere,” says Hill.

“Rejected,” Val repeats, louder this time. “At least be straight about that.”

Hill blows her bangs out of her face. “Rejected. But for reasons other than your qualifications.”

“Which is why it was fucking bullshit.”

Darcy looks back and forth between them. “Uh, clue me in, maybe?”

“Not the time,” says Hill, and at the same moment, Val says, “I’ll explain later.” Val glares at Hill. Hill looks singularly unperturbed by it all.

“You want a beer?” Darcy asks Maria Hill, because it really seems like the only thing to say.

Hill’s eyes snap to Darcy, and then she lets out a breath. “A beer would be great.”

It’s only once they’ve all been set up with booze—Darcy with vodka because yes, please; Val with some of her expensive bourbon that she keeps giving Darcy for Christmas despite knowing that Darcy is a) Jewish, and b) completely incapable of drinking bourbon, and Hill with the lager—that Hill leans back in her chair, and says, “SHIELD is dead.”

“Yeah,” Val says. “Captain America kind of made that fucking obvious.”

Darcy waves a hand at Val, because _this is not the time, pussycat_. “You were SHIELD.”

“I was Deputy Director,” Hill says. “And it all came out from under me. But that doesn’t mean that what we were doing—that what SHIELD was doing was entirely wrong. There are forces out there that people can’t protect themselves from, that they have no capability of understanding. You’ve seen them, Lewis. The Aether, the Destroyer, Loki. SHIELD was the first line of defense.”

“No, the Avengers are the first line of defense,” Darcy corrects.

“SHIELD started the Avengers.” Hill smooths her thumb over the rim of her beer bottle. “It’s independent now, but they were an initiative of SHIELD. We were their support, their back-up, their eyes. Without SHIELD resources, without SHIELD, they can’t keep up the same level of performance.” Darcy’s not entirely sure about that, but Hill looks troubled. She doubts very much that Maria Hill would say anything like that if she didn’t believe it, 500%.

“Do we want them to need to perform?” Val asks, quite reasonably, if you ask Darcy. “I mean, every time the Avengers get involved in something it’s usually world-ending.”

“Obviously it would be preferable that we not need them at all.” Hill actually sighs, and suddenly she’s not Hill, but Maria, and she looks very, very alone. “But there are still threats that need to be managed, people that need to be saved. And the Avengers can’t handle everything. Five people to save all of humanity, every step of the way? That’s impossible. That’s beyond anything even superhumans can do.”

“Uh-huh.” There’s a few silvery letters just peeking out of the collar of Maria’s button-down. Darcy can’t make them out. “And you need me because, what, you want me to be an Avenger? Because I hate to break it to you, but I’m like…the least exceptional person ever.”

“We don’t need more Avengers,” Hill says. “We need a network. There are still pockets of loyal SHIELD agents doing the best that they can, but after everything that’s happened, they can only work in the shadows. The Avengers need a back-up team. They need a support system. Not emotionally, but strategically. I’m already in place.” She says it so casually, as if this has always been the plan, as if they’ve talked about this before, as if this isn’t the first time Darcy has seen Maria Hill in over a year, as if this isn’t only the second time they’ve ever spoken. “I’m at Stark Enterprises. Human Resources. It’s a desk job, but it works. Press secretary, manager, whatever you want to call it.”

“I still don’t see how I factor in. I’m not going to be their therapist or whatever, if that’s what you want.”

“No.” Hill shakes her head. “You’ve shown yourself to be willing to be violent and to think quickly. You can shoot a gun, throw a punch. I want to enhance it. I want you to be their back-up.”

Darcy feels a bit dizzy. She takes a gulp of the vodka. “I’m not exactly back-up material,” she says.

Hill’s lips thin. “You will be when I’m done,” she says.

“Do I get a say in this?”

“You always had a say. You’ve been using it since the beginning. The question is whether you want to keep using that right of free speech to stick around and keep an eye on unhappy, caffeine-addicted astrophysicists, or whether you want to use what talents you already have to back up one of the greatest strike teams in the world.”

Val purses her mouth. “You want me in on this too?”

“I wouldn’t have made the offer in front of you otherwise,” says Hill, and there’s a spark of something that looks like triumph in Val’s face that Darcy’s not quite sure of.

“So, what?” She laughs, a bit queasy. “You want me to be a spy?”

“Spy, partner, watcher, keeper,” says Hill.

“Tinker, tailor, soldier,” Val throws in. Hill ignores her.

“I’m one. You’ll be another. And you,” she adds to Val. “We have more options, but for now, I’ve only spoken with you two. You’re already locked up behind NDAs, already drawn into it. This way, at least, you have some say as to whether you get locked in a bunker, or get people out of one.”

She should think about it, really. Darcy puts her glass of vodka down, and wraps her hand around her right wrist. _Maybe when no one is shooting at us_. She looks down at her wrists, and then up at Val. Val’s already made her choice. Darcy can see it. Whatever history Val has with SHIELD, Val’s already jumped in with both feet. And Darcy, well. She has her own ideas of what she could be doing.

“Yeah,” she says, after a while. “Why not? It’s not like I have anything else to do this summer.”

.

.

.

It’s not just for the summer, obviously. There’s no academy left for SHIELD recruits anymore. Technically, Darcy’s not even sure there’s such a thing as SHIELD recruits at _all_ , now that the Black Widow’s dumped everything on the net and vanished into the cacophony of the world. It’s still what Val calls them, but only because they can’t come up with anything different.

One night about six weeks into it, patching each other up after a long, long day, Val hums, long and low, and then says, “Sword.”

Darcy, tape still stuck between her teeth, blinks. “What?”

“Sword,” says Val again. “Instead of SHIELD. SWORD.”

And Darcy’s really not sure what to make of that, except for the obvious. “What would it stand for?”

“I dunno yet.” Val rubs the end of her nose. “But I’ll figure it out.”

Val de Fontaine can do whatever the hell she wants, so Darcy sits back and waits patiently for the acronym to emerge. In the meantime, she has knife throwing to master.

Maria calls in a lot of favors. She has a nine-to-five at Stark Industries, after all—actually, it’s more like a five am to eleven pm, including overtime pay, which does not make up for the way Maria comes in at night looking like she wants to chop Tony Stark into little pieces and set them on fire afterwards—so there’s not much that she, herself, can teach Darcy and Val aside from on weekends. And Darcy has a job of her own to get to, at the lab, where, surprise, surprise, she continues to do precisely what she used to do. She collates, she calculates, she prods Jane into sleeping and eating and spending time with Thor, if he’s around, and when she’s not doing that, she reads.

SHIELD’s over and done with, so all the old rule books have gone flying out the window, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of material she has to cover in a very short amount of time. All of the Avengers’ files, after all. Not just the ones that made the team, not just Rogers and Romanoff and Barton and Stark and Banner, but the candidates that, for one reason or another, didn’t quite make the cut. She likes the look of Hope van Dyne quite a bit. Spider-Man made the list, but was crossed off. Flight risk, is the only notation on his page, and Darcy can’t make out if it’s Fury’s handwriting, or Hill’s. Then Reed Richards ( _personality struggle between Stark and Richards too big a risk_ , says Agent iPod Thief’s loopy script); Susan Storm ( _Richards doesn’t share_ , is the note for her, which, gross); Luke Cage ( _conflicting loyalties_ , the file says, but Darcy likes the look of him, too, likes the lines around his eyes); the woman who’d once been known as Jewel (Jessica, her name is, Jessica Jones, and there’s a whole paragraph of reasons on why she’d be a bad fit for the team, not the least of which is traumatic backstory, because _holy shit, Batman_ ); James Rhodes ( _one Iron Man is enough_ , Agent iPod Thief writes, and she’s kind of sad she didn’t get to know this guy before he died, because his sense of humor is something she likes); and, last but not least, Bonita Juarez, who is, according to Hill, _just not interested_.

Then there are the other files, the darker files, the ones that make her skin crawl. The primary threats. The DEFCON five files. The big bads. _Victor von Doom_ is one. _Loki_ is another. _Magneto. Norman Osborn. Mystique._ She makes herself read it, all of it, the same way she made herself read the histories of the Holocaust for her World Wars class, the same way she makes herself read about massacres in the Middle East, about genital mutilation in Africa. She makes herself do it because she needs to know, and when she looks into the dark, she’s never quite certain if it’s looking back at her.

Maria calls in Bobbi Morse to teach them hand to hand. At the shooting range, she leaves them with Clint Barton, who’s not entirely certain what’s going on, but goes along with it because no one argues with Maria Hill, even when she’s in a three-piece suit and nice earrings. (Maybe especially then, considering how quickly Clint snaps to.) They go up to a school in Rochester and stay there for six weeks, which is both highly insane and kind of the most peaceful time in Darcy’s life. (She’s surrounded by people weirder than she is. It’s kind of awesome.) Then Natasha Romanoff reappears out of the blue, and she starts working with them too.

A month. Three months. Six months. A year. Carol comes back from her tour looking very windswept and tanned, and knows exactly what they’re doing the instant she lays eyes on them. “I wondered,” is all she says about it, and then they all go out to the bar down by Culver and get riotously drunk, because that’s what you do when one of your best friends comes back from military duty looking like she had something carved out of her. Darcy looks around the bar and realizes she can probably take out a good half of these people without them even realizing what hit them, and by the time she’d finished, Val would be done with the other half. Not to mention Carol, who jumps every time the jukebox changes songs, and keeps rubbing one hand along her ribs, though she’s not moving like she’s hurt.

“You have a bike of your own yet?” Carol asks, and then the viciousness of the moment shatters, and they’re back to themselves. The world is irrevocably different, Darcy thinks, but it is also very much the same.

.

.

.

The more she learns about HYDRA, the more her marks burn.

She doesn’t notice it, at first. She and Val are working so hard that sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the sizzle of overworked muscles and the ache of a sunburn. But once Val points it out one night—“you keep rubbing your wrists, did you do something to them?”—she can’t not notice. It only ever happens when she’s reading about HYDRA, when she goes over reports sent in to Maria by Sam Wilson and Steve Rogers, men she hasn’t met but whose minds she can read like her own. She reads about HYDRA facilities, about arms of the monster, and her wrists hurt. Soon she can’t look at a HYDRA report without her arms stinging, without a scalding in her skin.

“Tell me,” she says to them. “Tell me something.” But of course there’s no answer.

It’s not abnormal, of course. She’s heard of bonded pairs (or trios, or quartets) who’ve felt each other long before they met, who’ve ridden psychic waves, who’ve shared dreams. But sharing dreams is different from what’s happening now. This starts off mild and gets worse and worse and worse, and she can’t stop it. She keeps dreaming of the bomb. Before, it was maybe once a month, once every three weeks. Now it’s every night. Over and over. She closes her eyes and all she sees is the missile. Stark Industries is emblazoned fresh and blue on one side. (Stark weapons were phased out after Tony left Afghanistan, but there are stockpiles everywhere, not all of them were destroyed, there’s no way to know where it was or when it was or what happened and oh, _God_ —) Sometimes when she wakes up, she hears someone’s heart beating, and it’s definitely not hers.

On those nights, she bikes down to the shooting range (Tully gave her a private key a long time ago) and shoots and shoots and shoots until she can’t quite hold the gun straight anymore. _My Twins_ , she thinks. And one night, she says it aloud. “My Twins.” Her voice echoes strangely down the empty range. “My Twins,” she says again. “ _My_ Twins. What’s happening to you?”

.

.

.

Her first mission is unsettlingly easy until it’s not, and to be entirely honest, Darcy’s kind of pleased it all went FUBAR. Simple things make her uncomfortable now in a way they never used to before, simply because she can’t not look for a catch.

“Sometimes recon is just recon,” Sam tells her on their flight over to Romania, where according to one of Natasha’s many, many moles, someone or other’s mother’s uncle’s brother-in-law has seen the Winter Soldier. “We go in, wander around, and then leave. I doubt it’s anything more than what it sounds like.”

“If you say so,” Darcy says, and snaps the eye-mask over her face, because for god’s sake, they have a seven hour flight between LA and New York, and then another seven hours between New York and London, and then who knows how many more between London and Romania. She’s sleeping while she can.

It does, to Sam’s credit, start off as something fairly blasé. They track down Natasha’s source, who directs them to an abandoned hotel on the edge of Bucharest. There have been hobos living here for years, and if the Winter Soldier was here, he’s left no trace. They’re on their way back downstairs (Darcy about three steps back, because it’s her first mission, and Sam doesn’t want her leading) when she sees a flickering. She hears the footstep behind her on the creaky stairwell in the same moment the garrote snaps sudden and silver around Sam’s throat.

She’s always been worried she’ll freeze. Darcy always freezes when big things happen, just for a moment, just enough for her brain to process it. Here, though, she doesn’t. She turns, fires once. The gunshot illuminates the hall, just for a moment. There’s a man at the top of the stairs. She only sees him for an instant, but her aim’s good, and it takes out his kneecap. He hits the ground with a howl. Sam managed to get one arm up in time, but he’s struggling to get the second goon off him. Darcy fires again, and she hears something spatter against the wall as the man with the garrote tumbles down the stairs. She doesn’t look at his body, because she really doesn’t want to know if part of his head is missing.

“Sometimes recon is just recon, huh,” she says, and then they’re off at a sprint, because there are more guys after them, and each time one goes down they mutter _heil, heil, heil_.

They’re protecting something, these men. Darcy and Sam circle around. On the third floor of the empty hotel (because it’s actually empty, now, the HYDRA men coursing through the streets, searching for them) they find a room with an uneven floor. There’s a door behind a worn cabinet, and stairs that lead down into the dark. The lab is empty, for the most part. There are cells with worn cots inside. Some of them have strange stains. There’s a chair that makes Sam suck in air through his teeth, one with cuffs and a strange metal headrest that connects with monitors on the arm. Darcy goes through the files, and only realizes she’s smearing the pages with blowback (blood and gunpowder, red and black) when she gets through the first four pages. Her hands are shaking. _Experiments_ , she thinks. _Brainwashing_. There’s no paperwork on Bucky Barnes, nothing on the Winter Soldier, but it’s clear HYDRA’s been experimenting with different techniques. Only a quarter of the subjects have survived.

They take the files back with them to the hotel, and Darcy spends the night vomiting. She’s not sure if it’s because she shot a man in the face, or because she wishes she’d done worse.

.

.

.

She goes on seventeen missions in three months. Twelve of them are solo. Nine of them are into Eastern Europe. Darcy speaks Russian with a native’s accent, thanks to her grandmother, and so she’s the primary contact for everything east of Germany. She vets old SHIELD sources, makes sure they’re still legit. If they’re not, she deals with them. Val’s doing the same thing in Africa, cycling through Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, Berin, whirling through it like a tornado. Darcy spends three weeks in Prague just because she can, and every time she thinks HYDRA, now, her wrists buzz. It’s not pain anymore. She doesn’t know what it is. Eagerness. Anticipation. She doesn’t say it aloud, but it frightens her.

.

.

.

She’s running ops for Natasha in Moscow (and isn’t that hilarious, the Black Widow back in her native element; watching Natasha in Russia is like watching a snake shed all their scales) when they first hear about Strucker.

It’s rumors, at first. A scientist, the HYDRA men call him. Some of them say he’s a madman. _The Red Skull reborn_ , one hisses, before Natasha slams her fist into his throat. (She doesn’t kill them. Darcy does, if she has to. Darcy’s not an Avenger. Darcy’s back-up. It’s strange that she’s the one taking on the filth, so that the Black Widow—assassin, spy, Red Room exile—can keep her hands clean.) They find traces of him in Poland, in Budapest, in Lithuania. He knows they’re looking for him, the Avengers, their shadows. He must, because everywhere they go, he’s cleared out before they get there. _Strucker_.

They cross borders, from Slovakia to Romania to Sokovia. The last hits her like a punch. _Strucker-Strucker-Strucker_. She looks at the ruined city and knows these streets. _Sokovia-Strucker-Sokovia_. A missile through the wall. _Blood-Sokovia-Strucker_. Her head swims. She has to sit down. She can see Natasha saying something to her, but she can’t hear the words. _Blood-blood-blood_. Her hands are red. Help us, someone says, but it’s not speech, just a feeling dropped on her like a stone, just desperation, lancing, biting, screaming, _help-help-help-help-help_ —

—and she fades.

It’s the missile dream, but it’s clear, clearer than it’s ever been. The wall exploding inward. The underside of the bed. The logo—Stark Industries—staring at them, hating them. She feels someone’s hand in hers. She is Darcy. She is Other. _Worry-fear-terror_. Her stomach churns. Forgetting, she can feel memories sliding out the back of her head, can feel them vanishing, twisting, darkening. _Stop-stop-stop_. Those memories can’t go. They need them. They’re theirs. _Mine-mine-mine-stop-fear-no-wrong_. Lies and tricks and games. _Get in the chair, Wanda._ The feeling that they’re losing something. The feeling that they’re gaining something. Strucker, watching them quietly at the base of the platform. _Stealing-leading-giving-god_. Hide it, quick, but where, nowhere, mind not her own, body not her own, can’t do it, need someplace—

Darcy throws out her arms, or tries to, she doesn’t have a body here, doesn’t have a mouth. _I’m here. Use me. I’ve always been here_.

She makes no sound, but someone hears, and the memories, they burn and seethe and writhe and then something clicks in to place at the back of her head and it’s over, it’s done, and they’re gone, they’ve lost, and Strucker has them, wholly, they are Strucker’s, and _hate-hate-hate-hate-hate_ —

“No,” Darcy says, but she’s awake, and Natasha looks over at her with eyes that have seen the whole world burn. She doesn’t ask. Darcy almost wishes she would.

.

.

.

“Soulmates with telepathic bonds can’t communicate mentally without having met,” Bruce tells her over Skype two nights later, his eyes half-lidded and deep bruises beneath them. It's odd to think, but he was technically the first Avenger she ever met. If coming across the Hulk countsa as meeting. “It’s not possible. The bond isn’t forged. No one’s ever been able to do it.”

On the other bed, Natasha’s drying her hair. She separates it into handfuls and uses a towel, patting it, slowly, steadily, like a ritual. Darcy watches her for a moment, and then looks back to Bruce. “What if one of them’s a mutant?” she asks, because it’s the only thing she can think of that makes sense.

Bruce blinks. “Are you?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “No, I’m normal. But one of my marks might be.” Maybe not just one, she thinks. But the one who’d reached back, yes. Female, she remembers. She had that sense. Frightened. Determined. _Mine_. She rubs her left wrist, subconsciously. _Mine_.

He considers that. She knows for a fact that he’s running his thumb over his soulmark, wrapped around his middle finger like a ring. _My name’s Betty Ross_. “The person to ask about that would be Professor Xavier, not me. I don’t know a thing about telepathy.”

She’s already tried Xavier. Nobody’s answering at the Academy. “Thanks,” she tells him anyway, because it’s ass o’clock in the US and Bruce still answered the computer, because he’s an Avenger, and he knows she wouldn’t be calling unless it was important. “I appreciate it.”

“Are you okay?” Bruce asks, and she thinks. _I have memories in my head that aren’t mine. Names and places and faces and family. A missile in my bedroom._ Finally, she shrugs.

“I don’t know. Are any of us okay?”

She hangs up before Bruce can say another word.

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.

.

Darcy makes a list, because that’s what she always does. They are twins, her Twins—she can tell that from what little she can make out from the memories. There were always menorahs on their dining table during Hanukkah. _Jewish_ , she writes. The girl is older. _Wanda_. Wanda is Left Twin. Wanda is _I am sorry, can we perhaps talk about this later?_ Right Twin is Pietro is _Maybe when no one is shooting us_. Wanda is garnets and honey, a breeze, a bird. Pietro is mercury, all hurricanes and teeth. _Maximoff_ , she writes without thinking, and it’s not her handwriting, not her signature. It’s the writing of Left Twin. Wanda, she corrects. It’s Wanda’s loopy scrawl that looks back at her.

 _Darcy_ , she says along the link. It’s quiet and cold. She’s not sure if either of them can hear. _My name is Darcy. I’m coming for you._

_._

_._

_._

“You’ve found them, haven’t you,” Carol says. Stark Industries has spent the last six months of Darcy’s training hassling the Air Force to loan a few of their best pilots out to the Avengers Initiative. The Air Force, they’ve been told primly, and then pointedly, and then rudely, and then _get the fuck out of my office, Stark_ -ly, does not _loan_ anyone. Still, Carol’s service is up, and four weeks after her tour in Iraq ends she turns up in Maria’s office with a résumé and hard eyes. Now Carol flies them when they need quick drops, clean and quiet. The headset looks natural against the bright gold of her hair.

Darcy looks up from where she’s been cleaning her gun, tipping her head in a question.

“Your Twins.” Carol’s always been able to hear the capitals. She’s probably the only person who’s ever noticed without it being pointed out.

Darcy looks down at her clip again, and then wipes the barrel down with an oilcloth. “I haven’t met them,” she says.

“But you know who they are.”

Darcy shrugs, silent. Carol considers. Then she flips a few switches in her console (learning how to fly planes is still in the near-to-far future, in regards to Darcy’s training) and puts the bird in autopilot, dodging a box of something-or-other to drop down in the chair next to Darcy. She’s thirty-three, Darcy thinks. She and Carol met when Darcy was nineteen and Carol twenty-seven, and now she’s thirty-three. She doesn’t look much older than twenty-five herself. She flares her fingers out, and flexes them. There are scars along her knuckles from ring-fights.

“I met my soulmate,” she says, abruptly. “In Iraq.”

Darcy turns the gun over in her lap, and starts in on the other side. When Carol’s in this sort of mood, you have to pretend you can’t hear her at all. Otherwise she never says a word.

“She’s HYDRA,” Carol says. “Or she used to be. She said they had her working as a spy until she figured out who they were, what they wanted. She was working with someone out in Baghdad to take down one of the HYDRA nests.” She shrugs. “Might be the guy your friends are looking for, I don’t know. But I met her.”

Darcy glances at Carol out of the corner of her eye. Then she looks down at her gun again. “What’s her name?”

“Jessica.” Carol leans back in her chair. “Drew. She’s a few years older than you.”

“Mm.”

“When I introduced myself, the first thing she said was, _Oh god, not you_.” Carol says it flatly, as if it doesn’t hurt, but Darcy can see the sting in her eyes. “So if, you know. There’s something going on with your Twins that you want to talk about, you can tell me. Okay?”

Darcy slides the clip back into her gun, and sets it in the holster beneath her left arm. Then she leans her shoulder into Carol’s. Carol doesn’t hug her or anything—she’s Carol, for god’s sake—but she does push back. Her eyes are dry. Darcy imagines what it would be like to go through life bearing those first words on your skin, knowing right from the start that your soulmate would want you far away from them. She can’t bear the idea of it happening to Carol.

“I think something’s wrong with them,” she says. “One of them—she pushed some of their memories into my head. She wanted to hide them from someone. From Strucker. I think—I think HYDRA’s done something to them. Made them forget who they are. Brainwashed them, like—like Barnes, maybe.” She stares at the opposite side of the plane, tracing the rivets and the metal with her eyes. “It’s—I can’t access them all, the memories. They don’t fit right in my head. It feels like something’s been locked down, something’s been—I can’t describe it. If I try to get in, it hurts. But I know—I know they’re special. I know they’re angry. I know they went to Strucker looking for answers, and found HYDRA instead.” Carol tucks her chin in close to her collar, thoughtful. “See, I know that. But if—when I meet them, they might not know _me_. They might not want me at all, once they get to be normal again. They might not be fixable. They might—they might be gone already, and I’ve never met them at all.”

Carol heaves a breath. She puts one arm around Darcy, and digs her chin into Darcy’s scalp. Darcy slings an arm around Carol’s waist, and closes her eyes, just for a moment. Then Carol has to return to the cockpit. Darcy spends the rest of the flight into Budapest scrolling through mission parameters on her StarkPhone, trying to focus when all she wants to do is cry.

.

.

.

She’s actually kind of surprised when all three of them—her, Val, and Carol—are invited to Stark’s party. It’s not as though they’re Avengers, really, though—and she can’t deny this when Maria tosses it at her—she is technically affiliated with the Initiative, now. She _knows_ the Avengers, and, surprisingly, they like her. She goes out and buys a new dress for the occasion, a red thing that cuts down low over her cleavage and down her spine (there’s a scar in the flesh of her shoulder, now, from a bullet-wound just recently healed), and a slit up the side so she can reach the handgun she has strapped to her thigh. She’s not the only one carrying, either. She knows for a fact that Maria has three weapons on her person, and Val hasn’t even tried to be subtle; the bright butterfly ornament keeping up her long dark hair is a throwing knife.

Once she gets there, though, she’s not entirely sure what to do. It’s not as if she doesn’t know how to party. She’s just been…she supposes the word is melancholy, though Val would call her mopey, and Carol and Maria keep giving her significant looks. Still, she snarks enough that Thor doesn’t worry about her, and once he and Tony get into their pissing contest it doesn’t really matter anyway. Darcy trails after Val for a while, until Val, Rhodey, and Carol descend into shop talk, because that’s always what happens when Rhodey and Carol are in the same space. She’d go talk with Natasha, but Talia is Tash, tonight, her effervescent Society girl mask firmly in place, and Darcy doesn’t really get along with Tash that well. Nat, yes. Talia, yes. Tash, no. Darcy settles herself in a chair away from most of the crowds after that, kicking off her heels and drawing her knees up against her chest. The lights are very bright, out in Manhattan. She can see the Empire State Building from this side of Stark Tower, and the needle is lit up blue. Right Twin’s soulmark slinks out from behind one of her silver bracelets, a gift from Val for her twenty-fourth birthday. Darcy tips her head, leaning her cheek against the edge of the couch.

 _I don’t know if you can hear me_ , she says, not for the first time. Not for the hundredth time. Maybe the thousandth. _But if you can, give me a sign_.

There’s no answer.

“Hey,” Maria says, and Darcy opens her eyes and looks up to find her boss peering down at her with half a smile curving her mouth. Maria’s loosened up a little, since SHIELD fell permanently. No, it’s not that—she’s just easier with showing the parts of her that aren’t the ultra-efficient Deputy Director Hill, now that she knows the Avengers won’t turn their backs on her for it. _Women in a man’s world_ , Darcy thinks, and pulls her feet out of the way so Maria can sit down. _We have to be twice what they are to get half the credit_. “You look tired.”

“Flew in from Taiwan this morning,” Darcy says. “I don’t think I’ve slept in three days.”

“Well done,” says Maria, flat and wry. She drops down onto the sofa, bouncing a little. “You regret accepting the offer yet?”

“Pretty sure that if I didn’t regret it when Bobbi was making me do uphill windsprints, I’m not going to regret it because of jetlag.” She pauses. “Fear me, ’natch.”

“What a way to talk to your boss.” Maria sips at her drink, and leans her head back. She’s wearing long dangling earrings, a rare luxury, and they shimmer like stars against her throat. “They found Strucker.”

It hits her like a blow to the solar plexus. Darcy heaves a breath, and squeezes her eyes shut again. She hadn’t felt a thing from the Twins, not at all. “When?”

“Three days ago.” So, the Scepter mission. “You didn’t know?”

“I went from Sokovia to Beijing to Taiwan in the space of thirty-six hours. I didn’t hear everything.” Not to mention the fact that the only person who ever gets their reports in by Maria's deadlines is Steve, and she doesn’t have high enough clearance to access those half the time. She usually hacks it anyway, but she hadn’t the chance yet this week. “Was there—did anyone say anything about—”

She stutters to a halt, because Captain America has turned up by their couch. The Captain, not Steve, she realizes, seeing the way his eyebrows are knotting. She looks at Maria, and then up at Captain America again. “My bra isn’t hanging out, is it?” she asks, her voice reedy. “Because that would be ultra-embarrassing to have happen in front of a national icon. Again.”

“Maria told me your bonds were Sokovian twins.”

“That’s right,” says Darcy, who does not like Steve’s tone. “Did you find them?”

“One of them nearly killed Clint,” says Captain America, no warning, no hesitation, and Darcy’s really glad she’s sitting down, because her knees go a bit woozy at the hearing of it. Tony crops up out of nowhere, sipping at his drink. He looks like he’s spent the past week without sleeping, too, his hair sticking up in all directions as if he’s been running his fingers through it. “Enhanced. HYDRA operatives.”

Darcy presses her lips tight together for a moment.

“No shop talk, Rogers,” says Tony. “C’mon, who brings shop talk to a Stark party besides de Fontaine? And we all know where she gets _that_ from.”

“Were they hurt?” Darcy asks, because it’s the only thing she can ask. Captain America shifts to Steve, and shakes his head.

“Not that we know of.” He glances at Tony, and they do that weird co-team-captain communication thing with their eyebrows. Then Steve digs around in his pocket, and offers her a flash drive. “This is what we have on them. The twins.”

“The Twins,” Darcy corrects, and Steve searches her face.

“The Twins,” he repeats. Tony’s eyelashes flutter. She’s discovered, over the past few years, that the more Tony’s eyelashes flutter, the quicker he’s thinking. Considering the flicker-rate on his cheeks right now, he’s thinking very quickly indeed.

“Guy’s fast,” he says after a moment. “Girl’s weird. You know them, Lewis?”

Darcy closes her fingers around the drive, pressing it hard into her palm with her thumb. The bracelet shifts against her suddenly raw mark, and she sets her lips tight together. Then she makes herself smile at Tony. It’s a bit shaky, but it’s a smile. “Yeah,” she says. “Ever since they were born, Stark.”

“How long ago was that, five minutes?”

“Tony,” says Steve, but Darcy’s not offended. She meets Tony’s eyes, and hooks her hair behind her ears with both hands, drawing attention to her wrists, to the words twined around them. Tony’s lashes flutter again, like the shutter of an old-fashioned camera. She sees him understand the same way she sees him breathe, because he does it in the same instant. His mouth twists.

“Bad luck, Lewis.”

“Nah,” she says. “They’re mine. They’ll explain themselves sooner or later.”

“Better make it sooner,” says Captain America. “If they try to take out one of my team again, they’re not getting off so easy.”

“Which is why,” Darcy replies, “you’re taking me with you next time.”

Steve leans back, looks down his nose at her. (Which is dumb, because he’s already like…a million feet taller than her. He doesn’t need to lean back to look at her like she’s an ant.) “You could be compromised.”

“She won’t be.” Maria shakes her head. “She’s not stupid.”

“Regardless. The girl can—she manipulates minds. It’s not completely insane to assume she’ll have more of a hold on Darcy’s head just because of the bond.”

“Something’s wrong with them.” Darcy folds her arms over her chest. “Strucker did something to them, Steve. I can’t prove it, but—but I know it’s true. They wouldn’t be doing this if something wasn’t very wrong. And I can’t help them if I’m a thousand miles away.”

“You can’t know that for certain. You’ve never met them.”

“I know that six months ago I had memories shoved in my head that weren’t mine and locked away like they were supposed to be a secret,” she says. “I know that she—that Wanda was terrified Strucker would get his hands on them. I know that he was working in their heads. I know that much. I don’t know if they’ve been brainwashed or if they’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid or what, but they’re _mine_. You don’t touch what’s mine, Rogers.”

Steve’s eyes shadow. He looks away from her. She knows, then, that he’s thinking of James Barnes. Her heart stutters in her throat. To soften the blow, she adds, “And if I come, you have more of a chance of throwing them off balance than you would alone. Also, you get to see my gorgeous face more often than once every two months. It’s a win-win for all of you.”

“Rogers,” Maria says, but Steve doesn’t look away from Darcy, and Darcy doesn’t look away from Steve. Finally, he lets out a breath.

“Fine,” he says. “Next time we head out, you’re coming. You _and_ Valentina. You’ll be useful. But both of you will stay with Nat, and that means you’ll _stay with Nat_. Don’t make me regret this, Darcy.”

“Please. When have you ever regretted getting me involved in anything?”

Steve lifts his eyebrows, and his lips twitch. “Does Montenegro count?”

“Pansy.”

.

.

.

There are pictures, in the file. Before and after. She only gets a chance to open it after Ultron bashes them around and leaves, and so her sprained arm aches as she scrolls through the pages, flicking past charts she doesn’t have the doctorates she needs to really understand.

Honestly, she shouldn’t be surprised. It’s a medical history, a weighing, a series of tests. All the records of the experiments. There are pieces missing that make the memories locked in her head jangle like sirens, but the photos matter more to her, right now, now that she knows Tony Stark and Bruce Banner built a fucking artificial intelligence that has now been unleashed on the world. ( _Did backing them up mean taking them out someday, Maria? Because I’m wondering if some of them might not need it._ )

They don’t match the images she has in her head, her Twins. There’s red streaked all through Wanda’s eyes. Pietro’s hair is silver now, not brown. It shouldn’t shock her so much, the strangeness of it, because she’s never seen their faces before today. Still, she feels like she knows them. Darcy reaches out, runs her fingertips along the edges of the images on the screen. Something pulses in the back of her head. _Volunteers_ , the file reads. _Victims_ , she corrects. _Artificially enhanced_ , the file reads. _Natural mutants_ , Pandora’s box whispers, mutants whose powers hadn’t surfaced, whose powers should never have surfaced. Gene therapy, chemical experimentation, psychological testing. _The chair, the chair, the chair_ , and she can feel leather straps around her wrists, though when she looks down, there’s nothing but her marks.

She wants to tie Strucker to the wall and _carve_.

She reads the file three times, absorbs maybe ten percent of it, and then turns out her light. The curtains are wide open, and she can see the broad expanse of New York beyond. Upstairs, there’s glass all over the floor, shattered pieces of the peace. She should be helping her team predict Ultron’s next move, she knows. That’s her job, backing them up, throwing her weight in behind them so they have something to fall back on, someone to do their dirty work. But these are her Twins, and she’s not up for that. Not yet. She watches the lights, and reaches down the bond again, both sides of it, like she’s reaching out with both hands.

 _Help me_ , she says to them. _Help me understand_.

There’s no answer, not then. But that night she dreams of running. The world doesn’t blur, it turns filthy-slow, as if it’s been caught in amber. Everything slides down to a crawl, except them. Trees. Snow. The streets of a city at night. She can feel honey, soft and sweet, in the back of her head, helping her piggyback. She’s not sure if he can tell she’s there too. Everything in Pietro’s head quivers, thoughts darting back and forth like striking hummingbirds. Vicious, she thinks. Vibrant and vicious and real. Hers.

 _Soon_ , something whispers, and she knows it’s Wanda, because when she wakes she feels lips on her cheek. _Soon, soon, soon. You’ll be here soon, and once you’re here, everything will be all right again_.

Darcy can’t believe that—she doesn’t dare let herself believe that—but it’s a nice thought, anyway. She holds it close to herself when they fly out to Wakanda the next day, and she hears over the comms that that her Twins have thrown in with Ultron. She thinks of it as Carol flies them out to Iowa, running her fingers over the later etched into her left wrist. Later, and later, and later again.

.

.

.

“Why would Strucker fake his own files?” Nat asks, after they’ve settled at the dining table. The farmhouse is the sort of place that Darcy would never have imagined Clint belonging, but now she can’t picture him anywhere else—him or his snarky little soulmate. (She _likes_ Kate Bishop. She likes Kate Bishop a lot.) “There’s no point to it.”

This is her Teaching Tone. This is the tone that Nat uses when she’s already worked something out, but she wants to have you work it out yourself, wants to watch you struggle towards comprehension. Darcy really hates the Teaching Tone.

“Unless he didn’t want HYDRA to know where the Twins came from.” She’s been thinking about this, after all. “They’re mutants, or that’s what—that’s what the memories keep telling me. They might not have known about it, because their gene was recessive, but they’re strong. HYDRA doesn’t seem like the type of organization to willingly bring mutants in. Wipe their minds, call them enhanced, there you go. It flies with the status quo, and you get some powerful secret weapons in the bargain.”

Nat muses over this as she dismantles her Widow’s Bite bracelet, checking the insides as if she’s hunting for treasure. “And if the twins ever ask to see their own files, there’s no reason for Strucker to say no,” she says, which means Darcy’s passed. It’s always tests, with Nat. You pass them, or you never see her again, not as Nat. As Natasha, maybe. As Romanoff or even Talia, cruel, deadly, wicked Talia, the Black Widow, the daughter of the Red Room—yes. But not as Nat. Darcy’s still not entirely sure what test she passed to ever be introduced to Nat in the first place, but some small part of her is terrified that she’ll fuck it up.

“And there’s that, too.”

They sit in silence for a moment. Darcy had never really been able to appreciate silence until she’d met Nat Romanoff. Silence used to remind her of locked closets, of hiding in the dark. Now it’s just the smooth feel of gun oil between her fingers, companionship that doesn’t quite need words. Nat’s put her Widow’s Bite back together and threaded it over her wrist, locking it down, before she says, “They might not be fixable.”

Darcy slides the bullets into the clip. “I know.”

“They’ll probably be in Seoul with Ultron.”

“I know that too.” She cuts Nat a look under her eyebrows. “Act like you know everything and no one questions you. Remember?”

Natasha’s lips don’t even twitch. “Don’t forget you’re ours, first,” she says. “Ultron’s the priority. Any of us forget that, then we all go down. Stay with the team. Don’t go off half-cocked for people you might not even be able to save.”

Darcy wonders, for a moment, if Nat might not be a better co-captain of the team than Tony is. Steve leads them, Tony keeps them moving—or so she’d thought before. Now, she can feel a paradigm shifting. “I know.” She racks the gun, and sets it aside, making sure the safety’s on. There are too many prying fingers in this house to go around half-cocked. “But they were mine before I was ever yours. That means something.”

Nat sets her fingers to her wrist, to the gold platonic mark of _I learned Russian for you, you know_. Another telegraphed tell. Nat Romanoff deserved Phil Coulson as a handler. Then she lays both hands flat on the table. “Just don’t forget the team,” Nat says, and Darcy reaches across the table to touch the back of Nat’s hand. She’s really not sure what to say. _I’m sorry my soulmate fucked with your head?_ It sounds so meaningless in the face of everything. Ten minutes. Ten minutes to nearly rip the team apart all over again. Phil Coulson died to keep it together the first time. She doesn’t know what’ll have to happen to ensure that now.

“I won’t let her do it again, Natasha,” says Darcy. Nat looks up at Darcy through her eyelashes.

“Neither will I,” says Talia, and it’s not a threat. It’s a promise.

.

.

.

“Why did you send me away?” she hears Val say, that night in Iowa when she should have been asleep. Her window is open, and she rolls over, not meaning to listen, but not wanting to draw attention, either. “You could have let me go into the Academy. I might have been able to help you sooner. Why did you say no?”

It’s Fury who responds, Fury who ought to be dead, but isn’t. “Because we can’t afford marks in this game, Valentina,” he says, and a great many things click together in Darcy’s head. She marvels at the insanity of the world, that Nick Fury has a soulmate and that his soulmate is her best friend, her Valley Girl, and that Val sounds like she’s crying. Darcy’s never seen Val cry.

“That’s a fucking cop-out,” Val tells him, and then there’s the slam of a door.

Darcy rolls over, and doesn’t say anything about it at all.

.

.

.

Steve orders her to stay with Clint for this round, because Clint mainly stays in one place. Darcy’s not certain if she’s angry about that or relieved. She’s back-up, not an Avenger. She’ll work when they need her, but she’s not quite up for Nat-level acrobatics, for Steve-level heroics. So she aims and fires and reloads. If you shoot the ‘bots in the eye, they go down. There’s sensitive wiring back there. They don’t die, but they go down, and that means they’re not going to get back up.

She wants Val at her back instead of Clint, to be honest. But Val’s gone along with Tony Stark—“take the goddamn backup, you asshole,” she’d snapped, and Tony had gone along with it, because Tony somehow cannot say no to Val. (Darcy thinks it’s because he’s scared of women taller than him. Look at Tony and Pepper.) So it’s just her and Clint up here, and the hordes coming in at them.

Clint fires three arrows at once, and then says, “You okay?”

“Fine,” Darcy replies, and slides another clip into her gun. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason. Nat said you were twitchy.”

“Nat should mind her own business.”

On the other end of the comms, Nat says, “I _would,_ if you ever managed to get anything done on your own.”

“Ever think this might not be the time?” Steve interjects. He sounds wind-whipped and unhappy in a way only Steve can be, the unhappy that means _this thing punched me and it actually hurt, what the hell is wrong with the world_. “Considering.”

“Always a time for some goddamn therapy,” says Clint. Then he grins. “Sorry, Rogers.”

“Shove it up your ass, Barton,” says Steve.

Darcy shoots another robot in the eye.

.

.

.

She should have realized, when her twins turn their backs on Ultron, that they’re just as much a pair of heroic idiots as Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes ever were.

They sit apart from the rest of the group, saying nothing, watching them all with eyes like flint. Darcy’s almost shaking with the effort of not going to them, but she has shit to do. She’s helping Carol pilot (she’s been learning, the past month or so) and besides: the loss of Nat is too deep a sting.

 _Where are you, Talia?_ she sends out into the void, and she thinks she hears Left Twin-Wanda-Scarlet Witch shift uneasily in her seat. Darcy doesn’t turn around. _Don’t you dare die_.

“That them?” Carol asks, in a voice so low that even Darcy can barely hear it, and they’re maybe a foot apart. Darcy leans back into the co-pilot chair.

“Mm.”

“And you’re not back there because?”

“Ah, hard questions. They burn,” Darcy says. Carol remembers their talk as well as Darcy does. _If they don’t know me_ , she thinks, checking the altitude, _if they don’t recognize me, then this will all have been for nothing_.

“Always have to pick the hard road, don’t you,” Carol says, but then she drops it. When Darcy clambers up out of her chair, she realizes that the Twins are watching her.

.

.

.

Considering all the hype and all the pain and all the worry and the dreams and the memories and the fear, she’s honestly more worried about getting shot in the face by a robot when they finally exchange words.

Darcy’s clipped in the shoulder. It’s not particularly bad—she’s had worse—but she’s hit, and Steve sees it. His eyes go sharp under his cowl, and he says, “Quicksilver, get her out of here.”

In an instant Pietro’s there, and there’s a hint of white around his mouth that she knows, that she _knows_. And then Wanda’s there too, and they’re muttering in Sokovian over Darcy’s head. She’s hurt, but she’s not stupid, because she looks up at Pietro and says, “I swear to god if you carry me out of here right now, I will _hurt you_.”

Pietro’s hands go very still on her shoulders.

“And don’t you dare encourage him,” she adds to Wanda, because it seems like the only thing to say. Wanda’s eyes go wide, wider and wider, and they’re brown, at the core, but with the magic—there’s nothing else to call it but magic, light that devours and destroys and heals all at once—they’re laced through with scarlet. Then she purses her lips. Her wrists sting, but the words are real, even if she almost doesn’t hear them.

.

.

.

Somehow, it ends. _All things must end_ , her brain tells her, but honestly, she’s just hurting. She has a hole in the hollow space beneath her collarbone, and her right clavicle is fractured from the ricochet. Bruce is gone— _hey, Jolly Green, don’t forget us, okay?_ —and one of her soulmates is in an induced coma in the hospital (she can still feel the gun, feel it in her hands, the desperate sense that she’d been _just too late_ and the first bullet had landed and _no-no-no-no-no-mine_ —). Wanda’s in debrief. Darcy knows for a fact that the only reason Wanda hasn’t ripped a hole in the time-space continuum (which who knows if she can actually do) is because Darcy had caught her arm by the hospital bed, and said, slowly, clearly, “I’m not leaving him alone.”

Wanda had flinched back as if Darcy had punched her. She’d had the sense, then, of someone rummaging through her head, poking through closed drawers, shuffling papers. The locked box in her head had been skirted, untouched. Then Wanda had sagged, her shoulders coming down, spine curving, eyes closing.

“You will stay,” she’d said, and Darcy had nodded. She’s not left once.

Pietro sleeps. They have to keep him on a number of very strong drugs to prevent him from waking up while the hole in his guts is still open, still raw. The files they’d stolen from Strucker claim that the twins have accelerated healing factors. Nothing quite on Steve’s level, of course—Darcy’s seen how Steve heals, and it’s terrifying—but enough that Dr. Cho has classified Pietro’s status as “tentatively encouraging.” It doesn’t change the fact that seeing one of her soulmates with a cannula up the nose and an IV in his arm and everything else that they have him hooked up to is like having her skin scraped raw with a cheese grater. She keeps rubbing her right wrist, circling it with her fingers and squeezing. She doesn’t dare touch him, because if she touches him, that might make it real.

“You know,” she says, at about midnight on the third night since Steve marched Wanda away. “I never really thought about what would happen when I found you. I was—somehow the finding was the most important thing. That seems really dumb, now. But it was at the time, and now I don’t—I don’t really know what to do.”

The heart monitor doesn’t change. Neither does the blood pressure, or anything else that’s beeping or flashing. She rests her fingertips on the bed near his hand, but doesn’t reach out any further.

“You might not want to know me, after you get your memories back,” she tells him. “You and your sister. I’m not who I was when you guys marked me. I’m not really the same person. I’ve killed people.” It’s the first time she’s said it aloud. “I’m not an Avenger, I just—I help them with things sometimes. I’m not a hero, or a soldier like Carol and Maria, or a real agent like Val could be. I’m just Darcy. All I ever wanted to do was go into politics. Help change the world a little, make it better. And now I don’t know what I am.”

She has the stinging sense that someone is watching her from the doorway, but she doesn’t turn around.

“I didn’t just take this job to find you.” She leans back in her chair. “I took it because I thought I could be good at it, and I am. I even enjoy it most of the time. I’m just—probably not the sort of person who either of you would want as a soulmate, even before Ultron. So I guess—I dunno. I want you to be happy.”

It’s only once she’s dried her eyes that she looks around to find Wanda watching, her fingers curled around the edge of the doorframe. She looks haggard, like she hasn’t slept, her feet rooted to the floor. Her eyes flicker between Pietro and Darcy and Pietro again, as if she can’t decide who she wants to look at first. Steve is behind her, his ears a bit pink. Darcy gives him a left-handed salute. “Hey, Cap. Didn’t mean to get mushy on your old-fashioned notions.”

“Shut up, Lewis,” says Steve. He looks down at Wanda. “She’s cleared to be in the medical wing, for now. Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

“Funny, I could’ve sworn I said that to you right before Belarus. And the Ukraine. And Nicaragua.” Darcy knows that the twining black mark around Steve’s wrist is from Bucky, but she doesn’t know if it used to be silver or gold. She’s not sure it matters. “Get out of here, soldier, I’ll sleep when I need it.”

“Uh-huh,” Steve says, but he gets. Wanda doesn’t leave the door. She’s decided to watch Darcy, it seems, because she looks and looks without moving, and Darcy looks back. Then, finally, Wanda slinks forward, her head dipping like she’s waiting to be struck. There’s a plum-colored bruise on her sternum easily the size of Darcy’s fist, and it hadn’t been there before Sokovia.

“Thank you,” Wanda says, after a moment. Darcy looks back at the sleeping Pietro. Looking at Wanda for too long is like staring into the sun. Pietro’s easier, since he’s asleep, and can’t look back at her.

“I would have stayed,” she says.

“I know.” Wanda hums, deep in the back of her throat. It almost sounds like a lullaby. “You have something.”

Darcy turns again. Wanda’s brow has furrowed, her eyes narrowing. Red light sparks through her hair. It stops again almost immediately, and Wanda looks contrite, or something very near to it. Darcy wonders if it’s a bad habit. Then she snaps back into the moment. “I have a lot of somethings. I’d make a sex joke, but I’m kinda nauseous right now thanks to the bullet hole, so it’d really suck.” She pauses. “That’s what she said.”

Wanda cocks her head. Her lips flicker into half a smile and then out again. “In your head.” She taps her temple, as if to demonstrate. “You have something. Blocked. Hidden.”

Is this what lightning feels like? “You gave it to me,” Darcy tells her, because she’s not about to lie to her soulmate. “You—you hid it. In my head. You thought it would be safe there.”

Wanda doesn’t say anything. She cocks her head, and then frowns. Her lips press together. Darcy can’t see her soulmark, but then again, her own are a bit strange for being so visible. Wanda doesn’t say anything. All she does is lift a hand, draw her fingers down the line of Darcy’s jaw—clinical, not sensual, but it still makes her skin prickle—before setting her thumb to Darcy’s temple, and closing her eyes.

No, Darcy thinks, in the moment before the scream. _This_ is what being struck by lightning feels like. Her brain shatters and remolds and shatters again, fracturing, fracturing. The box flies open, and she sees it, all of it, laid out in front of her like a tapestry, needles, the chair, chemicals and radiation and pain and pain and pain and _no don’t do this don’t make me do this don’t take them away from me_ —

She splits, and vanishes.

.

.

.

When she opens her eyes again, she’s still in the hospital, but it’s a bed of her own this time. It’s the first time she’s woken up without Val or Carol there to keep an eye on her. There’s a hollow kind of emptiness in the back of her head that she doesn’t remember happening. She can’t remember what it contained. Her shoulder hurts. Actually, every part of her hurts. She feels as though she’s been shoved into a blender and set on puree. Even opening her eyes, even blinking—even breathing is agony. It takes a while before it starts to ease back, before she starts to regain herself. She makes herself open her eyes, makes herself blink, and then she stops breathing altogether, because there’s a hand on each of her wrists, a Twin on each side. She can’t remember what happened, really, but they’re here. Wanda’s mouth is bruised, and her eyes are half-lidded, watching her. Pietro’s sound asleep. He’s in a wheelchair, in a hospital gown, and she sees the bandages peeking out from underneath the shitty paper gown in the instant before she sees his chest rise and fall, before she sees him breathing. Darcy closes her eyes again, heaves a sigh. There’s a touch against her wrist again, against the back of her hand.

 _You’re all right._ Wanda’s telepathy is more a presentation of images and feelings than anything else, not really words. It still makes perfect sense. Darcy swallows a few times, but her mouth is too dry to really manage it. She’s pretty sure Wanda’s thinking at her in Sokovian. The words have a flavor on her tongue that can’t be explained otherwise. _Don’t try to get up. You’re safe._

She tries to ask what happened, but her throat doesn’t work.

 _I took the memories too fast_. Wanda hunches, her hair falling forward in front of her face. Her eyes are red-rimmed, Darcy realizes. Like she’s been crying. There’s a sudden image of her head, and it’s of _herself_ , writhing like a seizure, screaming, screaming. _It took days to set you right again. I had to fix the pieces inside._

So that’s why her head hurts. Darcy closes her eyes. _Okay, Darcy. Your soulmate broke your brain. As in,_ literally _broke your brain._ That’s one phrase she’s never going to use lightly again. _It’s okay,_ she thinks, shaping the words carefully, offering them to the bond. _You didn’t mean to. It’s okay._

“I do many things I do not mean to do,” Wanda says, and her accent is round and supple in the air. “That does not mean people have not died.”

 _But you fixed me, too_ , Darcy says, and Wanda closes her eyes for a moment. _It’s all right._

Wanda’s hand is shaking, but she pets Darcy’s wrist, not looking at her anymore.

 _You saved my brother_ , Wanda says, not speaking.

This means something important, but Darcy doesn’t have the brainpower to work it out right now. _He’s still hurt._

_But he is alive. Because of you._

Throat or not, telepathy makes her head hurt. “You have your memories back,” Darcy croaks, and on the other side of the bed, Pietro huffs, and his eyes open. Darcy swallows, and swallows again. _Awake, alive, and here._ Probably the last thing she’d expected to happen. Her luck isn’t that brilliant. “Have I been here the whole time?”

“Three days.” It’s not Wanda. Pietro’s watching her, and for the sort of man she thinks he is, he’s very still right now. His eyelashes are dark, not silver. “They kept you sedated.”

“Oh,” she says, and they all fall silent. She’s not sure what to do, now.

“You kept them well,” Wanda tells her. Her voice is husky, soft. “The memories.”

“I’m sorry I had to.”

Pietro shifts. “You did not know.”

“I could have done something sooner.”

“You did what you could,” says Wanda, in a tone that is impossible to argue with. There are deep bruises beneath her eyes. “And because of you we are ourselves.”

Darcy bites her tongue. She licks her lips. “Can I—um.”

Bonus to having a telepathic soulmate: all those awkward questions you don’t have the courage to ask aloud? Those get heard anyway. Wanda gives Darcy a sidelong look, and then shifts in her chair. She pulls her hair up off the back of her neck, and there in romantic silver is _and don’t you dare encourage him_ in her own sloppy handwriting. Darcy wishes she could touch it, but her limbs are all kind of heavy and gross right now. Then in the wheelchair, Pietro makes a soft, pained sound. By the time she manages to look at him, he’s pulled part of his hospital gown off, and the rest of her words are wrapped around the edge of his neck, curving down to end just above his left clavicle.

 _Matching_ , she thinks, _twins_ , and she _hurts_. Her heart hurts in the most delightfully swollen way. She tangles her fingers into the hem of the blanket, and Pietro sees it. He looks at Wanda, and then he reaches out, catching her hand and lifting it to the mark on his throat. He’s as still as stone as Darcy sets her thumb to _hurt you_ , her forefinger to _carry me_. He hisses a little when she touches him, and his eyes focus on her face. She can feel his pulse against her fingers. _Mine,_ she thinks, not for the first time, but it’s in that moment that she realizes— _and I’m theirs._ There’s a look on Pietro’s face that she can’t quantify otherwise.

 _Mine_ , she thinks again, and there’s a low, pulsing thrum through the back of her head where the bonds are. _Mine._

Wanda leans forward, her hair falling over her opposite shoulder like a curtain, and then the flat of Darcy’s palm is pressed against the nape of Wanda’s neck. The marks are just skin, she knows, just stains in skin, but somehow they feel warmer than the rest of them, either of them, pulsing against her fingertips. Darcy squeezes her eyes shut. Her arms hurt, goddammit. She might have only taken a bullet to the collarbone, but for god’s sake, it hurts. Humans are so breakable and stupid.

“You are not afraid of me,” Wanda says, when she’s settled back in her chair again. She pulls her knees up against her chest, her hands resting against her shins. “You are not afraid of either of us.”

Darcy really doesn’t know what to say. “Why would I be afraid of you?” Wanda’s eyes flicker. She looks away. Ultron flashes in her mind’s eye. _Ultron-Strucker-blood_. Magic. Mutants. Whispers in her head. “No.” She slurs a little. God, she’s so tired. She’s so _tired_. “No, I’m not afraid of either of you.”

Maybe half of that comes out as coherent, but she’s fairly sure Wanda’s running translation services in her head, because the Twins look at each other once. Pietro’s lips quirk up. Wanda reaches out, and touches her fingertips oh-so-lightly against the bruise on Darcy’s cheekbone. “You found us,” she says. “I knew you would. There was an eighty-nine-point-nine percent probability that you would if we went along with Strucker.”

There’s no way she can answer that. There’s no way she can _comprehend_ that. Because that implies that they went with Strucker just for her, suffered all that just to find her, and she can’t—she doesn’t—“I’m not that special,” she tells them. “You shouldn’t—you shouldn’t have gone through all that for me.”

“No.” Wanda shakes her head. “For all of us.”

Darcy loses her voice again.

“Ours,” Pietro says, flat, his eyes not leaving hers. “You’re ours. You’ve always been ours. We’re not leaving anyone who belongs to us behind. Not ever. Not _ever_.”

She thinks of the missile, the terror, the nightmares. _Two days._ Her marks are warm and syrup-smooth. Wanda says nothing.

“Good,” Darcy says, without looking away from Pietro. “Because you’re _my_ Twins. I’m not leaving you, either.”

The pulse comes again, and again. It makes her brain hurt. Then something spreads through her head, soothing, liquefying, and she can _feel_ it, the bond, the rush of feeling from both of them. _Emotive_ , she thinks, _like Jane,_ but then she’s swept up in the cacophony of _him-her-us-me-them_ , and it’s ragged joy and dazzling grief and hope that tastes like maple candy in her mouth. The shift is sudden, irrevocable, absolute, and Pietro’s eyes get wide. She thinks the ragged breath is Wanda. Darcy struggles to breathe, and then it eases. _Mine,_ she thinks, and the bond curls around her, contented.

“What,” she says to Pietro, because the tang of copper wariness, of anxiety, that’s from him. Wanda’s in her head and heart, but Pietro can only roost in one of them, and he can’t read her mind. “You didn’t expect it to happen that fast? Thought you were the fastest man alive, hotshot.”

Something tickles her ribs. She thinks it might be Wanda trying not to laugh. _Psychometrically emotive_ , feelings-through-sensation. That feels right. Pietro looks at her, and then his mouth curls up, and _god_ , this one’s wicked.

“Not where it counts,” he says, and that is an image she _does not need_ while lying in a hospital bed. Wanda laughs again, aloud this time. When Darcy lifts one hand, Wanda leaves her chair and settles on the bed beside her, her hip by Darcy’s head. She runs her fingers through Darcy’s hair, and it’s—Darcy can’t describe it. Darcy’s not sure how Wanda knows where to touch her so it won’t hurt, not sure how Wanda knew that this is all Darcy’s wanted for a long time—but of course Wanda knows. Pietro doesn’t let go of her good hand. _My Twins_ , Darcy thinks again, and then she’s drifting off into sleep. She thinks—she knows—she can hear them whispering. There’s a ringing in her head, and she’s not sure if it’s mercury or garnet.

 _Mine_.


End file.
